The Chance Not Taken
by Cap'n Pirate Monkey
Summary: Five snippets from a love that could never have been. Tracing Cuddy's relationship with Lucas from start to finish. Written as part of Help Japan 2011.


One

Rachel won't stop crying.

It's a wedding. It's a joyous event, supposedly. People are smiling, and dabbing tears of happiness from the corners of their eyes, and all Rachel can do is alternate between bouts of anguished howling and quiet, subdued sniffling.

She had contemplated not bringing her, but finding a sitter on such short notice? Impossible, even for Cuddy, who knows the power of the cold stare, the short sharp command, the polite but firm demand. Or at least she did, once upon a time; she's not entirely sure of herself these days.

Events unfold around her with the distance of a half-remembered dream. Cuddy feels strangely separate. Part of her is still bitterly angry; despite all that has happened, she cannot forgive House, not yet. His words still sting her. She tries to push them away, shove them under the rug somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind. To tune them out, like Rachel's high-pitched keening (and what a shameful thing, turning the cries of your child to white noise because you can't cope. What kind of a mother does that?)

The other part – the overwhelming part of her, straining and pushing to break free from behind her forced smile – feels like none of this is actually real. She is asleep, and Rachel is quiet, and in a few hours her alarm will go off and her circular routine will begin again. Perhaps it isn't House who has gone mad, but her; maybe she's sitting in a corner somewhere, arms wrapped around herself, barely aware of her daughter's increasingly distant cries.

She smiles and handshakes her way through the wedding, slinks away as soon as she is able. Her jaw aches. Rachel is heavy in her arms, wriggling and refusing to be placated.

Cuddy is struggling to get Rachel in her car seat when she hears a familiar voice.

"To the untrained eye, this might look like a kidnapping in progress."

She turns, exasperated. "What?" she snaps.

Lucas holds both hands up.

"Oh..." Cuddy falters; she's a bundle of anxious energy, but he's smiling, just a little, and the genuine warmth of it almost disarms her. Almost. "God. Don't sneak up on me like that."

"I'm sorry." And then, because she is still struggling with Rachel, he holds out his arms. "May I?"

_Keep her_, Cuddy thinks, and regrets the thought as soon as it occurs.

"Sure," she says. She passes the red-faced, wriggling ball of snot to Lucas, who sits her expertly on his hip. Rachel is momentarily soothed by this sudden change. She looks up at Lucas with red-rimmed eyes, her nose plugged with mucus, open-mouthed.

She stops crying. Just like that.

"Hey, little lady," Lucas croons, tickling her chin.

Cuddy doesn't know whether she is relieved or annoyed.

Two

Hands tear clumsily at clothes.

If there's an art to all of this, it must have passed them by. There is nothing delicate about the way Lucas fumbles with her blouse, the way her teeth keep finding the soft skin of his neck, moving ever downwards. They whisper to one another, increasingly urgent, desperate not to wake Rachel.

He kisses with the enthusiasm of one who can't believe his luck.

It starts off as a stress reliever, a way of letting off steam, and god knows it's exactly what she needs; it's been a while, and she had almost forgotten how unimportant the world feels in the brief respite of afterglow. Loose-limbed hedonism, tangled among bedsheets and bathed in companionable silence.

It's temporary, of course, and when Rachel's unhappy sniffling sounds in crackling waves over the baby monitor, Cuddy all but orders Lucas to get dressed and get the hell out. He does as he's told, sheepish as a scolded boy, struggling with his jeans.

It's not that she doesn't like his company. That's kind of the problem.

Cuddy lets him see himself out.

She'll call him again tomorrow.

Three

It's out in the open, common knowledge among her friends and peers, and Cuddy doesn't know exactly how it happened. The word 'cougar' is bandied about once or twice, but without malice, and there's a certain undertone of jealousy from some quarters; Lisa Cuddy, the single mom, bagging herself a cute younger man.

Curiously, she isn't as flustered about it as she thought she would be.

Rachel takes to Lucas with an ease she had not anticipated. She is fascinated by him; she responds to his voice with curiosity, is delighted when he throws her in the air. He sings tuneless lullabies and she lays in her crib, staring up at him with sleepy eyes, drifting slowly off to sleep. It's the perfect arrangement. Lucas' steadfast refusal to take anything seriously is a remedy to Cuddy's terminal seriousness. They are opposites in so many ways. It had never occurred to her before that perhaps her greatest obstacle in finding 'Mr Right' was her insistence on dating men just like her.

He comes when she calls him, goes home when she tells him to. The latter scenario is occurring less and less these days. They haven't spoken about it. Neither of them feels the need to. He keeps his aftershave in her bathroom cabinet, hangs his shirts in her wardrobe.

With Lucas, everything seems so simple.

Four

She crashes into bed at 11pm. She has been snowed under with paperwork. Her Blackberry has been bleeping incessantly. Rachel has a cold, and has only just dropped off to sleep. Cuddy stares at the ceiling, waiting for the next disturbance.

Lucas rolls over, draping a lazy arm across her waist. In the half-darkness, his eyes seem almost too blue. He regards her with half-lidded eyes.

"How's it going, boss lady?"

Cuddy waves a hand, and realised that it scarcely qualifies as an answer anymore. "The whole _world_ needs my attention," she says. She knows how petulant she sounds and she doesn't care. "There's only one of me. They'll have to join the damn queue."

"That's a shame," Lucas muses. His voice is thick with sleep. She envies him then; she envies his world, where pharmaceutical companies don't call at ungodly hours. Where his private life and professional life stay separate. At least when he wants them to. "That there's only one of you, I mean. Imagine what I could do with two."

His hand slips down, gently squeezing her ass. A mischievous grin plays on the corners of his lips.

Cuddy bats his hand. "Not a good time," she scolds.

Lucas retracts his wandering hand, rests it on the curve of her hip. "Sorry," he says. There is no petulance in his voice. He says sorry, and means it.

Cuddy is not used to people acquiescing without a fight.

She is definitely not used to apologies.

It feels...great.

She kisses Lucas with dry lips. His stubble is prickly against her skin. She smiles inwardly at the familiarity of it.

Cuddy closes her eyes and waits for a disturbance that never comes.

Five

When she looks back – poring over old photos, over the gifts he bought that still sit proudly in her living room, her jewellery box – she realises that Lucas' easy apology that night was the sign that it could never last.

She sits in her office, staring at reports that desperately need to be signed off. Her fingers seem numb and heavy; she doesn't trust herself to hold a pen. The absurdity of it would make her laugh, if she didn't feel so goddamn miserable.

It could never last. It was not meant to be. These are the thoughts Cuddy consoles herself with, and for the most part they are enough. Until she remembers how cold his hands had been when she handed back the ring. How he had stared at her, saying nothing at all, his eyes betraying the anger and hurt, the _unfairness_ of it all.

She had no reason. That's the worst part. House is not a reason, he's not an excuse, and she knows even as she plans what she's going to say to him later that any unresolved feelings she has for him ought to remain buried, hidden, locked in the dark depths where they'll never see the light of day.

House can do nothing for her, except perhaps to make her feel as empty as Lucas must feel now; she knows the logical conclusion to this fairytale. They won't live happily ever after. They can't. But Cuddy is a glutton for punishment, and the prospect of living in a semi-permanent state of misery, sharing in House's spite and misanthropy and waiting for the next short window of blissful happiness...

It feels like home. There. She had her chance for a happy ending and she blew it. Deliberately. Because the thought of living without conflict, without struggling for control...it seems so alien to her. She has fought her entire life. At this point, it's all she knows.

Cuddy rubs an absent-minded thumb across the patch of smooth skin where the ring had sat only hours earlier.

There's no going back now.


End file.
